killakanz's Tutorial for C&C3 Vehicles
Hello all. To start off I'd like to thank everyone for the amazing support and feedback over the years about the original tank tutorials. Sorry I haven't written any more for such a long time, but real life kinda took over. Also this new one for C&C3 turned up a bit later than planned, but I couldn't work on figuring this stuff out while I was in Iraq!
C&C3 is very different than Generals. For one thing, there's more than one way to set up a tank to work in the game and I intend to go through the basic and complex methods which you can use on almost anything so you can use the method that works best for your vehicle. I'm not going to go into the Level Of Detail (or LOD) modding here, as it would complicate things further. I would suggest you stick with your target level in your models and rig them appropriately for performance until you are confident enough to include different LODs.
Before you start on this, I strongly recommend that you've already gone though the original tutorials including the rigging for Generals to give yourself a basic grasp of modeling, animations, bones, links and exporting. The basic fundamentals between gmax and 3DS Max today hasn't changed much.
You will need 3D Studio Max 7, 8 or 9 and the following installed:
The Software Development Kit - comes with documentation, suggested reading!
The new Worldbuilder
Necessary 3rd Party Files that couldn't be included in the SDK installer.
You must have 3DS Max set to use display driver Direct3D 9.0 to be able to use shaders. To do this, open Max and go to Customize>Preferences. Click the viewports tab and Choose Driver. Select DirectX 9.0 and Ok. Close down Max and re-open it.
As usual, read the tutorial carefully, save your work often!